Angela Booth’s Smart Business Blogging

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You’re a Web publisher now: syndicating your business blog

May 23rd, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Your blog lets you stay in touch with your customers effortlessly, via its RSS feeds, and syndication.

“StepForth Tutorial: Blogs 101, Part 2″ offers a great explanation of what syndication is, and how it’s built in to your blog.

Anyone can subscribe to your RSS feed, and other webmasters can syndicate your content by displaying your RSS feed on their site or blog - instant global domination.

Encourage customers, suppliers and vendors to subscribe to your feed

In 2007, most people have no idea what RSS is, and how they can subscribe to feeds. However, that’s slowly changing. Windows Vista has support for feeds, so RSS is slowly becoming more widely known.

So encourage subscriptions. Add a note to your blog: “Click To Subscribe To Our Feed”, with instructions on how people can read your feed in their feed reader of choice, and how they can syndicate your content too.

Syndication is free, no cost, and spreads your message across the Web.

Company blogs have many uses

May 15th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Until you start your business blog, it’s all theoretical. Once a blog’s an active part of your company’s Web site however, you’ll be asking yourself why you waited so long.

The article “Vendors are blogging for dollars” points out:

Storage vendors such as EMC, HDS, NetApp and others are increasingly hosting blogs as a means to draw the individuals they most desire to reach and influence to their Web sites. These blogs serve a number of purposes. They can provide users with product updates from engineers and product managers working on specific products. Users can gain additional insight into the future of the product and provide input on its design.

Colleges are using blogs too. “Colleges use student blogs to recruit new generation” says that:

Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online.

The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.

“We found it a much freer, less constricting, far more believable way of letting prospective students glimpse what was going on on campus,” said Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

The primary benefit of a blog is immediacy, closely followed by visibility. A blog lets you stay in touch with your various audiences at minimal cost. It also ensures that your company is visible online.

Business blogging success study

May 12th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Not sure whether your business could benefit from a blog - or many blogs, written by your staff?

Here’s a Blogging Success Study conducted by Dr. Walter Carl at Northeastern University and John Cass and his colleagues at Backbone Media, Inc. The team interviewed 20 corporate bloggers. They bloggers were all asked the same questions. Requirements were that they’d been blogging for a year, and considered their blogs successful.

Why you should blog your business

May 5th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

There are several compelling reasons for you to add a blog to your business’s Web site:

* A blog gets more traffic to your site every day, without cost to you. Your blog will “ping” (send a message to a blog aggregator) whenever you make a new post, resulting in first a trickle of traffic, and then a flood;

* Your site visitors can subscribe to your blog’s feed with Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which means that you can stay in contact with them, again for free (all blogs have built-in RSS);

* Your blog can function as both a marketing and a customer relationship management tool. It’s a way to turn your customers into fans, and to reveal more about your business to potential customers and get sales; and

* It’s a way to build your brand and make sales… without advertising.

A blog takes just minutes to set up, and while it may take months (or over a year) for the search engines to index a new site, a blog will usually be indexed with a week. Link your blog to your site, and your site get a boost into the engines’ primary index.

Copyright © 2007 Angela Booth’s Smart Business Blogging

Credits: Angela Booth, Freelance Copywriter | Matteo Turchetto | Andreas Viklund